Annihilation

I started reading this book around lunchtime. I finished late the same night. I could hardly put it down. I found the writing style original and clear, without being devoid of description. I think the author has achieved one of the finest examples of a true introvert ever written. If you were a child who could sit and watch ants or frogs for hours, and found it easier than groups of humans, you will relate to the narrator. Some people have complained about the lack of pat answers, and the potentially unreliable narrator, but I think that the author handled both of these things very well.

The book does leave you wondering. Is this some alien infestation? Is this Mother Earth's ultimate center of recycling, come to recycle us all as a failed iteration that has screwed up too much? Is this some government experiment of crazy drugs or VR technologies, run amuck, beyond the pale, for who knows what ends? Some sorcerer whose spell got away from him? I think the purpose of the book is to make you wonder, and it does this very well. It could take any of these directions, and it takes none of them. If you want pat answers, then this book isn't for you. If you like to wonder, it may be.

There are horror elements, because bad things happen to some characters; sometimes of their own doing, because they can't cope (like someone on a bad trip); sometimes because they fall prey to the environment. However, this is not a simple slasher/monster book. In a way, I see a major theme of this book as the ability to become one with an ecosystem being the ultimate survival tool. That's the Biologist's special skill, the ability to become so absorbed by observation that she blends. Instead of immediate panic, she observes, and then she blends. The ultimate observer may be the ultimate survivor. She is also an introvert who does not freak out purely on the basis of being alone. This combination of personality traits serves her better in Area X than her peers' personality traits serve them.

I truly enjoyed this book. I'm heading straight for the sequel. I hope it is as enjoyable.

I think Steve Erickson's "Days Between Stations" has a train that goes near Area X. I have not had my perceptions as warped, by a mainstream literary/SF mashup, since reading Erickson's superb book and its sequels/related pieces. VanderMeer's prose works to pull the reader into the inner life of the unnamed narrator (all the characters are unnamed, for in-universe valid reasons). On the surface of the story, if you go by the blurb, you might think it's another take on "The Dome" by King - an area mysteriously cut off, but this time we're following the activities of the agencies on the outside.

No, not at all. The only King that is close to this is the bizarrely unfocused wandering in the shifting sands and spaces and warped timeframes of his first "Dark Tower" book, "The Gunslinger". Yet we are neither in Mid-World nor Erickson's world - we're in what might be the Gulf Coast or the Florida Atlantic coast, though again the exact place, before the world changed in the event that turned it into Area X, is never named.

Didn't know of this series, nor of VanderMeer, till I read John Scalzi's recent "Big Idea" post about/by VanderMeer on the 2nd book, the just-published "Authority". Read the substantial excerpt of that at McMillan's site, and immediately popped over to Kobo to buy the first. Could not stop reading it.

Usually I like to let perceptions settle at the end of a book that has a definite sequel, that is part of a planned series. Often, because the author hasn't released it yet. Even if I come late to it, I like to wait a while, because the author didn't release in immediate sequence, thus wrote expecting a gap in the reader's memory. But with both the short publishing gap between early-2014's "Annihilation" and last week's "Authority", the second of his Southern Reach Trilogy, I want to stay in the still-altered mindset coming out of "Annihilation" when confronting "Authority". Wasn't in the budget to buy another full-priced (not overpriced but normal "traditionally published" ebook pricing) book this week, but I need to go back to Area X.